Question for those outside of the USA - Measurements

[Vault101]

I've noticed a few different times where media outside of the US still use the term "foot" as a measurement. One example, in Yahtzee's book Jam, it says the city was covered in a three-foot layer of man-eating jam. Do they use "foot" and other standard (or whatever the hell our non-metric system is called) in other countries, or just use it for another reason in media?

in autralia....no not really, we use metric and the older measurement are usually from TV and such

makes it a real pain in the ass when I have to convert inches to cm when buying prints...

however I do wonder if its cultrual, but in the context of TV and that imperial does sound less awkward to use (Id say its probably cultural)

 

[Vault101]

Other countries like to complain that America is backward about a lot of things: gun-control, socialized medicine, creationism, etc... they're usually wrong, but one issue on which we most definitely ARE backward is our failure to embrace the Metric system.

Not sure if serious.

I actually kind of agree

not that it makes the country "backward" but its an old system that is still around mainly because of peoples reluctance to change to a different systm (thata arguably easyer to understand)

 

[Thaluikhain]

In Australia, we use the metric system for actual measurements, but feet and inches just sound cooler.

 

[e033x]

But dude...... No one wants to sit down at a bar and order a half a liter of beer.... It just sounds stupid. We want to order A PINT!

Actually, that is exactly what we do in Norway, except that "a half a liter of beer" is shortened to the more colloquial "halvliter", as in "En halvliter takk". ("a half a liter please").

In other words, metric all the way here, except a few instances, like boats which are measured in foot, and musical instruments which are measured in inches. Like who the hell says "my cymbal is 42cm wide"?

 

[J Tyran]

We're gradually edging further towards the metric system though, and I'm sure within a generation or so it'll all be metric.

Maybe that was the point of it, instead of confusing everyone with an immediate change to metric after we joined the EU change things bit by bit. Things have been introduced gradually yet the national curriculum focused on metric, so over the years everyone would be gradually educated away from imperial measurements.

 

[Krais101]

We use all the things.

Kilos?

Pounds?

Fuck that, stone.

Stones are the worst units of measurement ever conceived.

Your mum is the worst unit of measurement every conceived

Yeah.

Now what'cha gonna do?

"Can I get 2 your mums of flour?"

 

[thedoclc]

Mexico uses SI, but understands Imperial vaguely for trade with the US or for uses like construction where parts were standardized in Imperial units. Last time I was there, I needed PVC pipe and had to ask for it in pulgadas (inches) of diameter and metros (meters) of length.

@ Shodan1980: Inches of Hg is a non-SI unit of measure equal to the height of a column of mercury at 1 g which would create equal pressure to the measured pressure. So a column of mercury 760 mm tall (760 torr) would be 29.9 inches of mercury (760 mm --> 29.9 inches) which would equal 1 atm or however many bar or Pa (~100k), where the Pa is an SI unit (1 N/m^2). And if you think that's weird, in medicine there's measures of pressure in both mm of H20 (intrathoracic) and mm of Hg (blood pressure, oncotic pressures, gas pressures inside blood and the lungs, etc).

Why? Not a freaking clue.

A little off topic, but some more of medicine's weirdness, at least in the US.

Some medicines come in international units, or IUs. IUs measures pharmacological properties and has to be defined individually for each drug or vitamin by the WHO. Some dosing is an artifact from when things were doled out in grains, such as 325 mg of aspirin (5 grains). We get milli-, micro, and nanograms/dL, a wonky measure of concentration vs. the SI's molarity and molality. We get scales which sound objective but really are just clinical impressions (a grade II/VI holosystolic murmur and 2+ pitting edema - sounds objective, right?), or measures of things that don't exist (the drug has a volume of distribution of 200 L, in a 70 kg patient). Needles are in non-SI units with inches for length and gauge for width, though of course the contents are usually in SI. Catheters and endotracheal tubes are measured in French, another wonky scale. Body Mass Index is based of SI units, but almost always reported without units and can be taken from Imperial measures. In urine, the presence of white blood cells is measured in cells per microscopic field in many cases. Concentrations of IV fluids are listed in percentages and SI, but everyone refers to it in terms of an artificial unit close to normal human osmolarity. Normal saline is NaCl in water at a concentration -close- to the normal human, and you frequently refer to "half-saline," "quarter saline," "normal saline," or other fluids as compared to that value.

And everyone knows about the Bristol Stool Scale [http://www.sthk.nhs.uk/library/documents/stoolchart.pdf].

 

[thedoclc]

We use all the things.

Kilos?

Pounds?

Fuck that, stone.

Stones are the worst units of measurement ever conceived.

Your mum is the worst unit of measurement every conceived

Yeah.

Now what'cha gonna do?

"Can I get 2 your mums of flour?"

I dunno, sir. That is an awful lot of flour. I do not believe that two your mums of flour are to be found in the entire state.

 

[Zantos]

We use all the things.

Kilos?

Pounds?

Fuck that, stone.

Stone is a fantastic unit. Keep the dream alive! Kilos and pounds are far too mainstream.

Fun game - Start doing masters level physics work in stone, furlongs, quarts and calories. See how long before someone threatens with physical violence.

Is the plural of stone "stones"? For actual pieces of rock it is, but for units of weight it seems wrong.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

We use all the things.

Kilos?

Pounds?

Fuck that, stone.

Stone is a fantastic unit. Keep the dream alive! Kilos and pounds are far too mainstream.

Fun game - Start doing masters level physics work in stone, furlongs, quarts and calories. See how long before someone threatens with physical violence.

Is the plural of stone "stones"? For actual pieces of rock it is, but for units of weight it seems wrong.

I've been a big fan of such atrocities as furlongs per fortnight for many years. Stuff like that is guaranteed to always make people either laugh or burst into tears.

 

[Bertylicious]

I have a question for Europeans:

What measurements does your wood come in for shopwork? Here in the States some of our standard cuts are 2x2 (inches, but it is actually 1.5x3.5. Its cut at 2x4, then dried and sanded), 4x4, etc.

What does lumber come in overseas?

A guy who worked for a guy who talked to a guy who said he once got some money from Keyser Sozé told me that 2x4 can mean any size wooden plank.

OT: In the UK we mostly use the metric system but there are circumstances where we'll make use of more antiquated systems. For example; it is polite for a doctor to refer to a woman's weight in fipperchanks (1 fipperchank, of "fip" as we call them, is equal to 1 and three quarter stone which in turn is approximately reflective of 2 and a half cubic litres of creosote) as it will inevitably be a smaller number than conventional units.

Sports as well can be a source of ancient measuring systems. Cricket, which originated in public schools, uses a unit called the curlong. The fascinating etymology harks back to 1869 and a school in Hereford. The school didn't have a cricket pitch and a mathematics teacher called Quentin Rutherford was drawing up plans to have one put in, but the accepted size for a cricket pitch at the time was 3 furlongs across and they only had a little over 2 furlongs to site the ground.

Rutherford submitted plans for a scaled down pitch to the groundskeeper, but instead of anotating the dimensions with reduced furlongs, he instead used "Curlongs" and kept the units the same. Fortunately the staff were up to the job and the put in the ground to scale, though a curious thing was noted; the smaller pitch sized resulting in a far more fast paced and dramatic fielding game and was responsible for the creation of slips.

Cricket grounds are designed using curlongs to this day.

 

[Vrach]

http://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/science

Mush! MUSH I SAY!

 

[Assassin Xaero]

Metrics, all the way.

While I lived in US for a while, I eventually got used to all the alternative measures (although some are pretty counter-intuitive); but there was one I could never, ever, get used to: Fahrenheit. What kind of backward measure is that which sets the reference points at 32 and 212? Who measures something in 1/180th of an interval? I swear, after years, its bonkers to me...

I even asked my high school chemistry teacher about that one, and he didn't know.

 

[Monsterfurby]

I have a question for Europeans:

What measurements does your wood come in for shopwork? Here in the States some of our standard cuts are 2x2 (inches, but it is actually 1.5x3.5. Its cut at 2x4, then dried and sanded), 4x4, etc.

What does lumber come in overseas?

In Germany, which is a thoroughly metric country, we still use "Zoll" (inches) for things like that. We don't have feet, though.

Well, we do have feet, but we don't measure them in feet.

Whoever came up with measurements based on units of 12 anyway?

 

[CAMDAWG]

I work in air traffic and its all over the place. Global altitude is measured in feet, unless you're in Russia, where its metres. Air pressure is measured in hectoPascales (used to be millibars, don't get me started) though if you're in America its inches of mercury (WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!?) And every nation has it's own altitude where you go from the local air pressure to the standard air pressure on the altimeter of 1013 mB (or 29.92 inches for the colonials) So many conversions.

I've never heard inches of mercury, but I've used mmHg, which is almost the same as torr. It's simply the pressure exerted at the bottom of a column of mercury 1mm high, assuming a perfect vacuum above, standard gravitational acceleration, and fluid density. I imagine inches is just an imperial version.

OT: In australia, older people who haven't been involved in some sort of scientific area tend to use imperial, and most people still use feet and inches to casually refer to a persons height, but we use cm for more detail. Aside from that, almost everything is metric.

I don't think there is actually any country that is truly, officially SI-exclusive. Most people don't realise that the SI unit for temperature is Kelvin, and the unit for angle is radian. Nobody uses those outside of scientific fields.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

I'm in Australia, and they're just better for colloquial use. I never use "And then I ran a f***ing kilometre", I would use "And then I ran a f***ing mile" just for dynamics of sentence. Some things just sound better than others.

But yeah, in a scientific setting, I'd never go Imperial. Sorry NA.

 

[MetalMagpie]

I've noticed a few different times where media outside of the US still use the term "foot" as a measurement. One example, in Yahtzee's book Jam, it says the city was covered in a three-foot layer of man-eating jam. Do they use "foot" and other standard (or whatever the hell our non-metric system is called) in other countries, or just use it for another reason in media?

Both metric and imperial units get used in the UK. In general, imperial is used more often to give a rough figure ("It's miles and miles away!"), and metric to give an exact figure ("It's 27km away"). But there are also situations where it's just more common to use one than the other.

For example, people almost always give their own height in feet and inches. Which means it's usually clearer to give the height of human-comparable things (such as the height of a table or depth of carnivorous jam) in feet as well, so that people can immediately work out how tall that is compared to themselves. I know that I'm 5 foot 6 inches tall, so 3 foot of jam would be approaching my waist.

We also tend to give our weight in stones and pounds. But weights on food products (such as bags of flour) are almost always in kg. In the same way, the dimensions of a table as given in a catalogue will usually be in metres.

As a result of all this, unit conversation is a wonderfully British topic of conversation.

Brit 1: "The bag says three kilos."
Brit 2: "What's that in old money?"
Brit 1: "Well five kilos is about eleven pound, right?"
Brit 2: "So three kilos would be... Hang on, let me get the maths right..."

 

[Guffe]

Finland metrics...
But we also use the most common in the world which goes something like this:
"It's really fu**ing hot here"
"The fu**ing amount of fu**ing snow is too damn much"
etc, you get the point.

 

[Ziggy]

We use all the things.

Kilos?

Pounds?

Fuck that, stone.

Stones are the worst units of measurement ever conceived.

Your mum is the worst unit of measurement every conceived

Yeah.

Now what'cha gonna do?

"Can I get 2 your mums of flour?"

Did you just make a "your your momma's so fat" joke?

I dunno, sir. That is an awful lot of flour. I do not believe that two your mums of flour are to be found in the entire state.